MUNICH — Brunhilde Pomsel recalls the evening she attended dinner at her boss' villa on Schwanenwerder, an island in the Havel River in suburban Berlin. It was November 1944. The event, she later realized, was a gesture to keep her and other office staffers in good spirits as it became increasingly clear Germany was losing World War II.

Today, at age 104, Pomsel still vividly recalls how she worried about making small talk with her boss, especially after discovering she would be sitting to his right throughout dinner. After all, Joseph Goebbels, Adolf Hitler's Nazi propaganda minister, was a legendary raconteur who could vacillate seamlessly between captivating charm and cruel wit.

Her fears were unfounded.

"He did not speak to me at all, not even one word," Pomsel said during an interview in her Munich nursing home shortly before the 70th anniversary of Goebbels' death on May 1, 1945. "Simply nothing. He was stiff as a board."

An aloof narcissist who rarely made pleasantries was one of many sides of a man as cold in private as he was colorful in public, said Pomsel, who worked as his secretary.

He also was the pontificating minister who enthralled thousands at Nazi rallies, and he was a philanderer who frequently seduced movie stars and theater actresses despite his clubfoot and diminutive 5-foot-5 stature. "If I had been a movie star, he probably would have dazzled me with his charm," Pomsel said.

During the dinner at the villa, which Goebbels bought for a song after it was seized from a Jewish banker, he spoke mostly about himself. Not once did he turn to Pomsel to ask about her three brothers in the German military. "He didn't even ask me whether I liked it there or whether I had relatives fighting in the war, a standard question at the time," she recalled.

Two of her three brothers never returned from the front.

A few days after Goebbels committed suicide with his wife and six children, Germany surrendered to the Allies.

Pomsel, who worked for Goebbels from 1942 until his death, is one of the last surviving eyewitnesses of the Nazi power apparatus.

Before she met Goebbels, Pomsel worked in the office of a Jewish attorney. His business declined as the Nazis assumed power. He cut her hours and pay as she suspected he was preparing to flee the country, so she went looking for other jobs.

"The rise of national socialism was a really horrible time, very unsettled," she said. "Everything was disintegrating."

An acquaintance landed her a job at a Ministry of Propaganda radio station, which paid better than the attorney. During the mid-1930s, affiliating with Nazism appeared to be a means to secure employment. Pomsel admits voting for Hitler, as did most Germans at the time.

"A lot of people in Germany were just waiting for Hitler to finally rise to power," she said, noting that many Germans were struggling amid poverty. "Hitler was a preacher and told the people that we had been betrayed by our own government and by the other nations."

Pressed to talk more about Hitler, she declined. She also has repeatedly refused to discuss the Holocaust, in which an estimated 6 million Jews were exterminated by the Nazis.

When the Propaganda Ministry recruited her to work for Goebbels, she claims she couldn't say no. "It was an obligation, a mandatory duty," she said.

Brunhilde Pomsel once served as a secretary for Joseph Goebbels, minister for propaganda under Adolf Hitler.(Photo: Marion Brucker)

But Pomsel also was drawn to the atmosphere and good pay at the ministry. "I really loved the job, loved working with other pleasant, carefully selected women," she said. "We had to work in shifts, but we were allowed to arrange our own schedules and change them whenever it suited us to do so."

The job put her at the center of historic moments.

In February 1943, after the Nazis' defeat by the Soviets at Stalingrad in southern Russia, Goebbels tried to relieve the Germans' depression by rallying them in a speech at the Berlin Sports Palace. Party representatives and others were ordered to the stadium on short notice and interspersed among the crowd so they could applaud in all the right places.

"I was chosen because all the others were better at getting out of this," Pomsel said, remembering that she sat in the bleachers alongside another secretary.

Pomsel spent the days before Germany's surrender in the basement of the ministry with her colleagues, as artillery rained down on Berlin. She learned of Hitler's and Goebbels' suicides from other staffers.

Afterward, the Soviets sentenced her to five years in prison. She stayed in former prison camps that included Buchenwald, Hohenschoenhausen, Landsberg and Sachsenhausen. Her family had no idea where she was, she said.

The Soviets never asked her a single question about Goebbels. They were more interested in what she knew about other prisoners. She kept a low profile and spent her years in the camps peeling potatoes, working in the laundry room and mending laundry sacks. "It was no bed of roses," she said.

After her release in 1950, she headed back to Berlin to make a fresh start, and landed a job at a new public radio station. When her manager was transferred, she followed him to Munich and ended up working for him until her retirement in 1971.

Today, she's satisfied with the later chapters of her life. Her biggest decision recently was opting to live in a nursing home almost two years ago, when she realized her eyes were failing her even as her mind and memories of Goebbels and the days of Nazi rule remained sharp.